A few weeks ago I played a concert in Portland, Oregon which was attended by exactly 18 people. After everyone else got paid, I made exactly $12.50 USD. I know that independent musicians all over the world play to empty rooms all the time. I’ve played to quite a few myself. But the thing about me is that: I’m actually famous.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Bob Lefsetz constantly writes about how the music industry is all broken and how music is greater than the machine that has grown up to exploit it.

Now here’s an example of a musician taking control of her trajectory with a new idea. Go read the post to see.

Writers should pay attention to this.

Why?

I once attended an appearance by a famous writer. I won’t name him. And one of his books had recently been adapted into a movie with major stars that got rave reviews. The turnout was about that for the above musician. The writer’s jaw dropped. I was puzzled too. But it was also a warm NYC evening and it could be people wanted to be somewhere other than a small bookstore.

3 responses to “Marketing Music Differently”

Interesting. I’m glad this is working for Kim, but I wanted to point out that it is not a new idea. I remembered having seen a new service a few years ago that was designed to be a destination site where people could search for their favorite artists and leave requests for them to come to certain places. When enough people had requested that an artist come to particular place, the site would work as an online agent, contacting the artist to organize a performance.

It took me a while to find the site again, but here it is: Eventful. I found this article about it from 2006, which may interest you because one of the examples of a successful event was… A BOOK READING!!

The site still exists, and while a search for Kim Boekbinder didn’t turn up anything on it, the site seems to have a fair amount of traffic; about the same as EventBrite, or around 1/10th that of TicketMaster according to Compete.

Although the idea is similar, I do note a few differences between this approach and Kim’s. As she is pre-booking a concert for particular dates, it’s much less risky for her if fans are committing to attend the show beforehand instead of just saying they’d like her to come to their area. Also, her fans have an easy place to find out about possible events on her website. They might not think to request a show from her via eventful.com. I’m not sure if Eventful made the jump to social media when it took off, but I did notice on their blog they have widgets for MySpace, Facebook and other artists websites.

@laura Thanks for the information. I have played Kim B my radio show (Womyn Making Waves, weft.org Sunday 1-3pm produced by a collective of women) because I ran across a reference to her on some website or maybe twitter or facebook and I really like her music.Thanks for the information, mike